Could Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ meet its doom within 3 years?
“Time is melting away for one of Antarctica’s biggest glaciers, and its rapid deterioration could end with the ice shelf’s complete collapse in just a few years. Alarmist researchers warned at a virtual press briefing on Dec. 13, 2021 at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU), a once outstanding professional society, but now a shill for the left.
Above is the first sentence of the article Titled “Antarctica’s ‘Doomsday Glacier’ could meet its doom within 3 years,” not what we would expect to see from a once reputable source, American Geophysical Union. It warns us that in a few years, the world’s largest glacier, about the size of Florida, will melt and raise ocean levels by up to 3 meters, about 10 ft. It then tells us that the glacier is melting from below because the surrounding ocean waters have been warmed “thanks to human-induced climate change.” Finally, it tells us that a team of more than 100 scientists from the USA and the UK has been studying the Thwaites glacier and sharing their findings with scientists worldwide.
The article then explains that the Thwaites is not melting from above, but “the melting is coming from below,” from the warmed-up oceans that have been warmed by human-made CO2 and the greenhouse effect. The bulk of the article then proceeds to detail the forecasted consequences around the world:
- Flooding in all coastal communities with a dramatic picture of Venice,
- The hundreds of icebergs released to the open oceans,
- How the cataclysmic break-off of this gigantic Thwaites ice shelf may cause an acceleration of the melting of other ice shelves. Etc.
- Concludes how the team of scientists will continue to monitor the developments and keep the scientific community, policymakers, and the public informed.
Read the complete article here. So, even if this crack team of USA and UK scientists kept the world’s scientists informed of their findings, they may not have kept themselves informed of what other scientists were finding.
This team may not have even been communicating with each other. Almost a decade earlier, geologists were seeing evidence of volcanoes in a known active tectonic plate boundary, buried under the glacier and the oceans. Before 2017 at least 47 volcanoes were found in western Antarctica and around the area of the Thwaites glacier. In 2017 the Guardian reported that an additional 91 volcanoes had been found along the western shores of Antarctica, with some sitting under the Twaites glacier itself. See the article “Scientists discover 91 volcanoes below Antarctic ice sheet” here.
So here we have an article by Mindy Weisberger, published December 21, 2021, at least four years after discovering the 91 additional volcanoes (138 total), that does not even mention the word volcanoes, not even once. If our arithmetic is correct, this Thwaites glacier should have broken off around 2019, but it’s still there and still melting from below caused by volcanic activities, yet these useless so called scientists still place all the blame for melting on humans.
What are we to conclude? Was this article an example of an “isolated mistake” by one person/one publisher or another example of the disinformation campaign of the CO2/greenhouse warming alarmists? It is clearly the latter.
Unlike you dear reader who is likely mildly provoked by this.
Human caused climate change lies that surround you on a daily basis, your authors have been immersed in this greatest of all frauds for careers stretching more than half a century. We have researched lies at United Nations conferences back into the 1960s. Therefore it’s makes it impossible for us to avoid the topic at every single social exchange of words. Last week for the junior author it was buying a fuel pump at Advance Auto Parts. Where ever we can , one by one, we try to unburden folks with the lies they have now grown up with. It is a small step for humanity but at days end we feel we have done something to help fight this war of scientific misinformation.
Authors
Terigi Ciccone
Engineer, Science Enthusiast and Artist. Loves reading and travel, Naturalist, Author of the new book “A Hitchhiker’s Journey Through Climate Change.”
Dr. Jay Lehr
CFACT Senior Science Analyst Jay Lehr has authored more than 1,000 magazine and journal articles and 36 books. Jay’s new book A Hitchhikers Journey Through Climate Change written with Teri Ciccone is now available on Kindle and Amazon.
Science’s Untold Scandal: The Lockstep March of Professional Societies to Promote Climate Change
Icecap Comment:
Thank you Tom and Jay. You are exactly right. It extends to all societies. It is a sad day for science. See this earlier post.
“When it comes to future climate, no one knows what they’re talking about. No one. Not the IPCC nor its scientists, not the US National Academy of Sciences, not the NRDC or National Geographic, not the US Congressional House leadership, not me, not you, and certainly not Mr. Albert Gore.”
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By Tom Harris and Dr. Jay Lehr May 24, 2019
(Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay)
When we started our careers, it was considered an honor to be a member of professional societies that helped practitioners keep up with the latest developments in their fields through relevant meetings and publications. Senior author Dr. Jay Lehr had the privilege of leading one of these societies long ago.
But things are different now. Whether it be chemistry, physics, geology or engineering, many of the world’s primary professional societies have changed from being paragons of technical virtue to opportunistic groups focused on maximizing their members’ financial gains in support of the climate scare, the world’s greatest science fraud. In particular, they continue to promote the groundless hypothesis that carbon dioxide emitted as a result of mankind’s use of fossil fuels is leading to environmental catastrophe. You have been hearing about it for the past decade and more, with 21 candidates for the Democratic nomination for the presidency in the next election promoting some form of a Green New Deal - a plan to eliminate the use of fossil fuels and replace them with wind and solar power thereby returning society to the lifestyle of the 1880s.
Dr. Patrick Moore, a co-founder of Greenpeace, wrote in 1994 that radical greens had taken over the organization after the fall of the Berlin Wall, leaving him no choice but to resign. The takeover of environmental institutions by extremists is now almost complete, the most important of which may be the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). President Donald Trump is aggressively trying to win back the EPA in the best interests of the nation, but it is an uphill battle as the climate cult has also taken control of academia, political parties, and governments themselves.
An example of how professional societies have apparently been hijacked by extremists concerns the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta, Canada (APEGA). Allan MacRae, a prominent long-time member of APEGA, was named to receive its most distinguished lifetime achievement award in 2019. Then APEGA staff learned that MacRae had written publicly about the damage done to humanity and the environment by radical greens. APEGA leadership strongly condemned his comments and his award was withdrawn. It led MacRae to write ”Hypothesis: Radical Greens are the Great Killers of Our Age,” which explains the APEGA award withdrawal and to support his contention that radical greens have done enormous harm to humanity and the environment with their destructive, misguided policies. MacRae writes, “APEGA refused to discuss the evidence, and baselessly claimed the moral high ground.”
One commenter responding to MacRae’s essay posed a question, the answer to which tells an important story: “How did the Greens get control of APEGA?” Another commenter answered:
The same way they have taken over every other professional organization. The actual members are too busy building their careers and actually working in the field to spend much time worrying about the day to day operation of the organization. As a result, they are taken over by lawyers and activists whose interest is in pushing their own agenda, not advancing science for humanity.
Another reader commented:
“The long march through the Institutions” as proposed by the Frankfurt school back in the 1930s was launched knowing it would be a generations long policy. Here we are three generations on and they have now taken control of all the western institutions as planned. The socialists do not stop just because their prime construct, the USSR failed in 1990. They regard that failure as simply work in progress. The climate as a tool which can never be tamed, was a genuine piece of strategic genius by the COGS (constantly offended green socialists). They will not stop. The destruction of humanity is too big a prize, they view this activity as pressing the Earth’s reset button.
The same thing is happening in the United States, where feathers were really ruffled at the American Physical Society (APS) when Dr. Hal Lewis, emeritus professor of Physics at the University of California, sent his resignation letter to the Society after being a member for 67 years. In his letter, he described the joy of working with brilliant physicists for decades, when no one expected to get rich in this field. Lewis explained how studies done within the society had effective oversight that enabled members to stake their reputations on the work of the organization. He said that has all now changed. Open dialogue has disappeared and all organization policies follow the new politics of the organization leadership rather than the membership. It is apparently focused on the money that accrues to the organization and its members by going along with popular concerns.
Lewis’ letter can be found here. A telling quote from that letter follows:
It is of course, the global warming scam, with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave. It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist. Anyone that has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the ClimateGate documents which lay it bare.
Lewis went on to state that he recruited over 200 members of APS to oppose the new APS policy that fully supports the global warming fraud. Their request for a hearing on the issue was completely ignored.
On March 31, 2019, the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) issued a press release announcing the launch of The Climate Solutions Community, a broad committee to identify viable solutions to mitigate, adapt, and become resilient to the effects of climate change. They totally buy into the dangerous man-made climate change hypothesis with no consideration of alternative points of view. AICh’s description of their efforts highlight the fact that employment can be gained for their members as a result of the climate scare.
The Geological Society of America (GSA) has fallen into the same trap. In April 2015, GSA issued a Position Statement asserting that:
Human activities (mainly greenhouse-gas emissions) are the dominant cause of the rapid warming since the middle 1900s (IPCC, 2013). If the upward trend in greenhouse-gas concentrations continues, the projected global climate change by the end of the twenty first century will result in significant impacts on humans and other species.
The GSA backs up the statement with vague evidence from paleoclimates and offers their full support for the reports of the widely discredited United Nations International Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC).
As is evident from the process described on the GSA Position Statement FAQs web page, the full membership of GSA is not polled after the development of Position Statements. Consequently, it is unknown what fraction of the membership actually support the final statement. However, clearly, GSA leadership recognize that such a position offers employment to many of their members trained in geology.
The lockstep march of professional societies in support of climate alarmism has been going on for years. For example, fellow of the Royal Society of Canada (RSC) and a leading Canadian energy expert, the late “Archie” Robertson of Deep River, Ontario, explained in the April 28, 2006, edition of the National Post what happened in Canada:
To claim that the IPCC-2001 assessment was “supported by the Royal Society of Canada” is stretching the truth. Prior to last year’s Montreal conference, the president of the Royal Society of London, whose manner of promoting Kyoto has been criticized, drafted a resolution in favor and circulated it to other academies of science inviting co-signing. The Canadian Academy of Science is one of three academies within the Royal Society of Canada (the other are from the humanities). The president of the RSC, not a member of the Academy of Science, received the invitation. He considered it consistent with the position of the great majority of scientists, as repeatedly but erroneously claimed by Kyoto proponents, and so signed it. The resolution was not referred to the Academy of Science for comment, not even to its council or president (I learned this when, as a member of the Academy of Science, I inquired into the basis for the RSC supporting the resolution).
A similar episode happened in the United States and Russia concerning The Royal Society initiative. Pronouncements from other science bodies are often just the opinions of the groups’ executives or committees specifically appointed by the executive. The rank and file scientist members are rarely consulted at all.
Past IPCC lead author Dr. Richard Lindzen, professor emeritus of the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, explained the problems with a previous National Academy of Sciences report here and concluded: “there is no consensus, unanimous or otherwise, about long-term climate trends and what causes them.”
All of this seriously damages the image of these once-respected professional societies in the eyes of both the public and the membership.
The climate cult that has taken over the environmental movement has never been about the environment. It has always been a mechanism to advance socialism, grow government, reduce individual rights, reduce human population, and ignore the human suffering and environmental damage their policies cause. Activists promoting this anti-human, anti-environment agenda appear to suffer emotional and psychological problems which they seem to deal with by attempting to make others miserable.
On April 27, 1961, at a speech in New York City, President John F. Kennedy said:
We are opposed around the world by a monolithic and ruthless conspiracy that relies primarily on covert means for expanding its sphere of influence - on infiltration instead of invasion, on subversion instead of elections, on intimidation instead of free choice, on guerrillas by night instead of armies by day. It is a system which has conscripted vast human and material resources into the building of a tightly knit, highly efficient machine that combines military, diplomatic, intelligence, economic, scientific and political operations.
Those words describe socialism, a system sold as Utopia. It appears that a yearning for Utopia never dies, because it springs from innate spiritual qualities of humanity. But as we have seen in every instance of national-scale socialist “Utopias” such as Cuba, China, Russia, and Venezuela, the result is inevitably suffering, scarcity, environmental degradation, oppression, and death. Truth, reason, and logic are the first values sacrificed along the way. Professional Societies must stop supporting it.